Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

also named Ananus,
     whose four other sons (and one son-in-law, Joseph Caiaphas) had all taken turns serving
     in the post. It was, in fact, the elder Ananus, whom Josephus calls “the great hoarderof money,” who instigated the shameless effort to strip the lower priests of their
     tithes, their sole source of income. With no Roman governor to check his ambitions,
     the young Ananus began a reckless campaign to rid himself of his perceived enemies.
     Among his first actions, Josephus writes, was to assemble the Sanhedrin and bring
     before it “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah.” Ananus charged
     James with blasphemy and transgressing the law, sentencing him to be stoned to death.
    The reaction to James’s execution was immediate. A group of the city’s Jews, whom
     Josephus describes as “the most fair-minded and … strict in the observance of the
     law,” were outraged by Ananus’s actions. They sent word to Albinus, who was en route
     to Jerusalem from Alexandria, informing him of what had transpired in his absence.
     In response, Albinus wrote a seething letter to Ananus, threatening to take murderous
     vengeance upon him the moment he arrived. By the time Albinus entered Jerusalem, however,
     Ananus had already been removed from his post as high priest and replaced with a man
     named Jesus son of Damneus, who was himself deposed a year later, just before the
     start of the Jewish Revolt.
    The passage concerning the death of James in Josephus is famous for being the earliest
     nonbiblical reference to Jesus. As previously noted, Josephus’s use of the appellation
     “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah,” proves that by the year
     94 C.E. , when the
Antiquities
was written, Jesus of Nazareth was already recognized as the founder of an important
     and enduring movement. Yet a closer look at the passage reveals that the true focus
     of Josephus is not Jesus, whom he dismisses as “the one they call messiah,” but rather
     James, whose unjust death at the hands of the high priest forms the core of the story.
     That Josephus mentions Jesus is no doubt significant. But the fact that a Jewish historian
     writing to a Roman audience would recount in detail the circumstances of James’s death,
     and the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his execution—not from the Christians
     in Jerusalem, but from the city’s most devout and observant Jews—is a clear indication
     of justhow prominent a figure James was in first-century Palestine. Indeed, James was more
     than just Jesus’s brother. He was, as the historical evidence attests, the undisputed
     leader of the movement Jesus had left behind.
    Hegesippus, who belonged to the second generation of Jesus’s followers, affirms James’s
     role as head of the Christian community in his five-volume history of the early Church.
     “Control of the church,” Hegesippus writes, “passed, together with the apostles, to
     the brother of the Lord, James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has
     named ‘the Just,’ for there were many Jameses.” In the noncanonical
Epistle of Peter
, the chief apostle and leader of the Twelve refers to James as “Lord and Bishop of
     the Holy Church.” Clement of Rome (30–97 C.E .), who would succeed Peter in the imperial city, addresses a letter to James as “the
     Bishop of Bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the Holy Assembly of the Hebrews, and all
     the Assemblies everywhere.” In the
Gospel of Thomas
, usually dated somewhere between the end of the first and the beginning of the second
     century C.E ., Jesus himself names James his successor: “The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know
     that you will depart from us. Who will be our leader?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Where
     you are, you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into
     being.’ ”
    The early Church father Clement of Alexandria (150–215 C.E .) claims that Jesus imparted a secret knowledge to “James the Just, to John, and
     to Peter,” who in turn “imparted it to the other Apostles,” though Clement notes that
     among the triumvirate it was James who became “the first, as the record tells us,
     to be elected to the episcopal throne of the Jerusalem church.” In his
Lives of Illustrious Men
, Saint Jerome (c. 347–420 C.E .), who translated the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), writes that after Jesus ascended
     into heaven, James was “immediately appointed